Will Vinton's Claymation Marvels - Thur. June 12 - 8PM

Oddball Films presents Will Vinton's Claymation Marvels, an evening celebrating the work of one of the most creative and entertaining animators of all time, Will Vinton. The winner of an Academy Award, numerous television Emmys, and international animation awards numbering in the hundreds, Vinton used Claymation, a term he trademarked, to great effect in his early career and later bringing to life iconic advertising characters the California Raisins and M&Ms. Vinton began experimenting with clay animation in college and his breakthrough short Closed Mondays (1974) garnered him international acclaim as well as an Academy Award. Vinton explains his process – in his typically clever and metamorphic way – in Claymation (1978). When a band of long-haired hippies begin to rock out in the middle of nature, the whole mountain (flora and fauna alike) gets in the groove in Mountain Music (1975). The terrible lizards have never been more entertaining than in the pre-hysterical Dinosaur! (1987) and Vinton turns Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle (1978) into a psychedelic freak out! Plus more claymation madness including Eliot Noyes Jr.'s Clay or the Origin of Species (1964) and original 1957 Gumby short In the Dough.

Dinosaur! (Color, 1987)A classroom goes claymation crazy when Will "California Raisins" takes on the terrible lizards to hilarious and imaginative effect. Dinosaurs don tuxedos, munch on tasty treats and their heads morph into cats in this off the wall (and rails) take on prehistory.

Mountain Music(Color, 1975)

Truly bizarre claymation hippie music concert out in the sticks. A pastoral nature scene slowly gives way to heavy rock freakout, with volcanic results! The versatility of the clay media lends itself perfectly to this psychedelic wonderland.

Closed Mondays(Color, 1974)

This breakthrough film created by Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner won an Academy Award in 1975. In an after-hours visit to an art museum, a drunken man encounters the world of modern art. As he wanders through the gallery, paintings and sculptures shift from illusion to reality, an abstract painting explodes with rhythmic movement, a Rousseau jungle releases its captive images, a Dutch scrub woman talks about her plight, and a kinetic sculpture comes briefly and breathtakingly to life. A tour-de-force of clay animation that set the standard for Claymation as an art form.

Claymation(Color, 1978)

Filmmaker Will Vinton and his staff of animators discuss the processes of clay animation, showing the mixing of colors, creation of characters, production and editing of the guide film, music scoring and the actual clay sculpture techniques.

The Academy Award-nominated stop-motion film from Eliot Noyes offers a kinetic take on Darwin’s revolutionary work. Backed by a swinging jazz tune, clay takes form as everything from primordial ooze to carnivorous creatures, devouring, dividing, and dancing to the rhythm. It’s survival of the fittest, and this crowd-pleaser stands up.Noyes worked for Sesame Street in the 1970s, where he produced the beloved Mad Painter series (he also designed the MTV logo).

Gumby: In The Dough (B+W, 1957)

Everybody’s favorite little green shape shifter, Gumby and his B.F.F. Pokey bake up some blood-thirsty pastries that are ready to eat their bakers in this rare print of Art Clokey's original Gumby shorts.

Curator’s Biography

Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009.

About Oddball Films

Oddball films is the film component of Oddball Film+Video, a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Summer of Love, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.

Our films are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.